On Apple’s Battery Service page, they say “Your [Apple Watch] battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 1000 complete charge cycles.” What they don’t tell you is how to tell how many charge cycles your watch has been through. Here’s how:
- On your iPhone, go to Settings > Privacy > Analytics > Analytics Data
- Scroll down to the latest log-aggregated-20nn-nn-nn-nnnnn.. and open it. (You should see at least 2 of these files. The one you want says Watch OS at the top of the log data). Don’t see any logs? Then you need to turn Analytics on. And wait a day.
- AirDrop the log to your Mac and rename it to a text file. Open it in TextEdit and Cmd-F for: cycle_count (Or you can just scroll about 3/4 way down the phone screen.)
My Series 1 is at 769 cycles. It’s mostly fine. Occasionally a third-party audio streaming app causes excessive battery drain and I have to charge it twice in one day. But that’s the exception. With a 1000 cycle lifetime, and my use case, that’s almost ~3.8 years of daily charging. Pretty good lifespan for a tiny 205mAh smart watch battery.
Hopefully in a future revision of watchOS, Apple will create a battery health screen. Then this digging (or unnecessary trips to the Apple Store for diagnostics) won’t be necessary.
